[Ethics-by-design and its relevance for biotechnologies]

Ethics-by-design has been developed recently as an approach prompting developers of new technologies to take into consideration ethical issues at the stage of the design process. This approach is guided by the need to anticipate effectively ethical issues that will likely arise with emerging technologies: Embedding ethical considerations at the design stage is a strategy to mitigate early the potential pitfalls of fast-developing tools. At the European level, several guidelines and methodologies have already been proposed, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. This synthesis is a primer on ethics-by-design that sketches a discussion of its roots and principles. Beyond artificial intelligence, it raises also the issue of the extension of ethics-by-design to biotechnologies.